Mark Zuckerberg made quite an announcement today as he introduced the public to an official integration between his lovechild Facebook and the ever popular video chat client Skype. This is soon to tie into Microsoft’s plan to consume Skype, which would then benefit from the Facebook addition. Another key move by the Microsoft corporation to compete with Steve Jobs and his crew over at Apple. All new features coming to facebook include group chat, a new way to chat, and Skype-enabled video chat to improve the overall Facebook messaging feature.
Its pretty rare that you see Google playing catch-up in the digital world, but now you see exactly that at its finest. Googles biggest effort to enter the social networking world is foreheaded by Google+. The service allows you to interact with your friends and family in a slightly – perhaps more elegant way than Facebook and MySpace.
With Google+ you can place your friends effortlessly into groups, join a “hangout” (basically a big video chat) with who ever is chilling on Google at the moment. Google+ is different in one way, however. Unlike facebook where when you share information about yourself, everyone on the site or internet can see what you’ve said or posted. On Google+ (apparently) youll be able to choose exactly who see’s what info – just as you would in real life. “In real life, we have walls and windows and I can speak to you knowing who’s in the room, but in the online world, you get to a ‘Share’ box and you share with the whole world,” said Bradley Horowitz, vice president product management. “We have a different model.”
Close analytics show that Facebook may be catching up to Google even in terms of searching – the same searching that Google is meant to perform. Heres a bit of info pulled from NYTimes’ article: “In May, 180 million people visited Google sites, including YouTube, compared with 157.2 million on Facebook, according to comScore. But Facebook users looked at 103 billion pages and spent an average of 375 minutes on the site, while Google users viewed 46.3 billion pages and spent 231 minutes.”
Whether or not Google is too late, you may see some changes with your Google homepage / experience! Look for the new service being advertised and give it a try to see if you like it, you never know. Personally, I think that a less public “facebook experience” could be a great model for more introverted people, as well as an older generation who feels less comfortable sharing all of their information with everyone. At first I hated Facebook b/c I was obsessed with MySpace, so you never know whats next.
Just wanted to drop this gold nugget that was posted up on Gizmodo today becuase its definitley something you should take a look at if you’re a facebook user, we all are don’t lie. Follow the steps and you should do away with annoying spam and third party apps; as well as, the ocassional creeper or two. However, this will not block your parents from getting one, that comes with time(aka changing their password)… Linkage
Technically Speaking 